100% it looks like a lot of feeling things out and seeing what we have. I think that’s the case for the players and the staff. With so many new faces that’s kinda expected I’d say. With essentially no pre-season a lot of the team is learning and figuring out combos etc. on the job. For as rigid as CTB is, he does toss in wrinkles and adjustments as the season goes along and I think right now he’s still trying to figure out the floor of the current team to decide what he can build.
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By the way the coach got tight during the 2019 postseason run too… understandable knowing you have a team that can win it all.
Key and Huff had been playing a lot leading up to the madness and inexplicably got reduced a ton
Key averaged 21 minutes per game in Acc play and then was reduced to 10 min per game in the madness before the Texas Tech game. Thankfully he played the last 8:30 of that game.
Huff had averaged 11 minutes per game in Acc play and was reduced to 17 total minutes in 3 madness games - effectively DNPs in the other 3.
UVA won Acc games that year by an absurd 13.7 points per game.
It’s not a coincidence that Huff and Key combined for 21 points and 15 rebounds and 4 steals in only 46 minutes combined in the first 2 rounds and UVA mostly cruised once they were inserted.
P.s. I still think about my substitution patterns in the soccer state tournament games too. 
p.p.s. The most famous play of that run was when Ty looked to Tony for instruction on the 2nd free throw and Tony refused to make eye contact. So there ended up being freedom to miss and you saw Kyle coaching Mamadi to back tap it. The players basically freely called their own play in the moment.
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I, too, am frustrated with our national championship.
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Okay lets not do this again LOL. I think my original point just stands but the whole “Jay Huff should have played more so we could have won the national title even harder” point im not so sure about…
I remember @HoozGotNext was tracking it and found that most players under Tony Bennett don’t have their worst game during the regular season but during march madness? Could be paraphrasing incorrectly though
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Not denying this, but also not sure this is factual in regards to what happened and how it played out.
The play is likely the most influential moment in UVa basketball history but the why behind it is a little more difficult to state as fact.
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Am I mistaken or didn’t Ty say he wasn’t trying to miss on purpose?
Regardless though going back to the original discussion I do think making at least minor adjustments to our regular season approach is important this year. Whether that be through rotations, schemes, practice etc. I’m willing to go through slightly more hardships throughout the year if it means we’ll have an easier time making it past the first round of the tourney. More Michigan State style I guess.
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Ty also entered the lane too soon. Could have been a violation ha. Either he meant to miss or realised he pulled the string immediately cause he crossed the FT line before ball touched rim
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I can tell you with 100% certainty that Ty had zero to do with the outcome of that FT. Cosmic justice took over during the second half against Gardner-Webb and we just climbed onboard for the rest of the NCAA ride. The outcomes were drawn already - just had to fill in the colors.
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Well it’s a silly point because the real point is Braxton Key should’ve played more and we would’ve won the national title with much less stress 
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Yeah I’ve seen some salty Purdue fans mention the lane violation a couple times lol. Watching the post game press conference back for the first time in a while, Ty mentions he just short armed the FT. Would imagine he knew almost immediately it wasn’t going in.
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Operationally, what I think of w/r/t offensive freedom (a few examples) :
- Taking shots more opportunistically earlier in the shot clock
- Attacking the hoop when there’s a lane, and when you have a guy on your hip (and creating secondary actions off of that)**
- Moving the paradigm (slightly?) from guys getting disciplined (benched, PT yanked, whatever) for missed rotations, turnovers, etc. to guys getting disciplined for not making the most of offensive opportunities. Lots of coaches bench guys for passing up shots. Does that strike anyone as something we do?
- Finally, and I doubt this really ever comes, pushing tempo where it makes sense.
** This is probably the one that, for me, gets the freedom discourse a bit muddled with ball screen v. off-ball screen. #1, our version of sides tends to lead to more jumpers, etc (but obv. not always). #2 Good ball screen offenses lend themselves more (IMO) to guys attacking the hoop and making reads off those drives.
Rohde ran so much of that DHO stuff with the Tommies. That’s no less a “pattern” than Sides, but it tended to get guys the ball in places where they were empowered to make a play.
A lot of this is really personnel, as many have pointed out. I’ve been a little disappointed in iMAc’s ability to get to the hoop. Saw it some in AAU, have seen it mostly not at all this season. Hoped it would be an add-on. Not yet. Disappointed in RD’s lack of a jumper so far. Hoped it would get to good enough. Not yet. What Rohde was doing for the Tommies hasn’t translated, never mind taken another step in development. Reece is a marginally improved version of Reece. Still figuring out what Bond gives us.
And I’ll end with another random tangent – thinking about the talent stuff in the previous paragraph – I think my freedom thoughts are also about whether the smartest thing to do is just keep getting those guys comfy with Sides, or doing something else? I think Tony’s answer is that Sides is like a mini-boss in a Nintendo game. If you can’t get past Sides, you can’t get to the other stuff. So the lack of freedom is sorta Tony deciding he doesn’t want to try another pattern. But would another pattern work better?
See, I promised I would type more words and I did. Man of my word(s).
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Let’s attack this from another angle: B/M is definitely the base set. Debate whether it should be or not, but it is. So with a really young/new team, perhaps most of the practice time has been devoted to getting it down. And it was working fairly well. Until Wisconsin, who had an answer. So, borrowing from the arguments of those who think this team needs time and will improve as we go (I mostly agree), maybe the real issue the last 2 games was really just a lack of time to adjust. One might understand why the staff couldn’t just draw up the response to WI’s tactics during the game. If your team is new and hasn’t been working on something, maybe you can’t just change on the fly. Then WVU was just 2 days later. Still not much time. We didn’t look great, but we won.
Let’s hope that with a week to work on stuff a) the staff has formulated a plan to address what they see as the most important issues on both ends of the floor, and b) the players have had enough time in practice to work on implementing whatever the plan might be.
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Yeah, think that’s all fair. There wasn’t much time between games, and with so many new pieces, we had to spend lots of time on everything in the offseason/preseason.
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Plus the vaunted Ball Room Effect
No matter what that Hoosiers guy said in the movie the ball room dimensions and lighting is just different
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That was more or less a normal arena, though, right? Seemed like we were practicing in a conference room, though
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Can’t argue with this - although the ankle may contributed somewhat.
True as well - his offensive game has not blossomed.
When we talk about Rodhe’s defense and passing, then he really hasn’t contributed much for the number of minutes he’s been given.
Yeah. He’s not stuffing the stat sheet like a prospective Round 1 draft pick should be.
Yeah on this as well. Wait, best hair on the team for sure.
I’m now completely depressed and am unlikely to watch another minute of this poorly constructed team. CTB has clearly missed on talent evaluation AGAIN. And what has Sanchez added to boot?
OK, maybe I’m being a bit of a pessimist. Maybe, six games in is too early to draw meaningful conclusions? Nah, who am I kidding, I can draw meaning ful conclusions from a much smaller sample size. Maybe I can get on the VT bandwagon
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Just two quick responses:
- Only looking offensively, here.
- I don’t think 6 games is too early to draw meaningful conclusions about those 6 games. I do think it’s too early to draw conclusions about the whole season, but it can be useful to draw out some inferences and reasonable guesses. The future remains hard to predict, which is what makes this fun.
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I’m not claiming to be an elite basketball mind by any means, but our issues on both ends seem pretty obvious to me. And on both ends my concerns are the same as they have been all season: the post/interior.
On defense, our rebounding has been really bad. Other than that, there have been some breakdowns in rotations / guys being lost that hopefully get cleaned up with experience as the season progresses. But despite those issues, Torvik metrics show the defense in all ain’t that bad, even if you confine it to our 3 top 100 games.
I think the key issue on offense is related to the same lack of interior presence. Of the 3 guys that play what I’ll simplify by labeling “post” (BB, RD, JG - yeah I’m leaving Leon out on purpose), only RD is scoring at the rim and none of them have established anything consistent in “other 2-pt” situations. BB did have the one great game. That just makes our offense pretty one dimensional, and therefore pretty easy to guard. We are hunting the 3. Even if we touch the paint, we’re still mostly looking to kick it out. Plan B is Reece takes it to the rack, and while he’s made some plays, overall I don’t think he’s that great at it.
On both ends, some if it is going to just be personnel related, and unlikely to get significantly better this year. I’m not sure RD is going to get there on offense (as a shooter) this year. Impossible to know how much BB progresses through the year. I think it’s safe to safe JG is not going to be a force on the boards or too much of a threat to score from 2.
The question is how much we can scheme and/or coach around the issues. If we can just clean up rebounding a little on defense, I think we’ll be all right on that end. On offense if we can just find a way to make it harder to overplay our shooters on the perimeter, then we should be able to take and make more 3s (I don’t know exactly how to do it, that’s why I pay Tony so much money).
But… the answer seems to be Leon bond.
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For me it’s defensive rebounding. If we improve it makes us spend less time per game on defense and more time on offense. Would improve the energy needed to generate good shots.
A big reason we looked terrible on offense is we exerted so much energy just trying to end defensive possessions with a rebound…and then they looked relieved and not excited to move to offense.
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I think Dunn is underutilized offensively. When he and Groves are out there together, teams are actually hiding their center on him. And we don’t try to exploit it at all. Largely because that’s outside the boundaries of the scheme. I think Dunn could really do damage in those situations if you get him in favorable spots…in the mid post where he can face up and go to work.
Also blocker-mover is the third rail for UVA Basketball fans apparently. Good lord. One little mention of dissatisfaction and there’s arguments in my mentions from people who’ve probably been bickering with each other over the same thing for a decade.
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